One area of automotive vehicle technology that is evolving rapidly is the area of autonomous or semi-autonomous drive capabilities for road vehicles. This is enabled through the introduction of sensors, for sensing vehicle motion and surroundings, and actuators, for controlling different road vehicle functionalities, such as steering, throttling and braking. Increased on-board data processing capabilities ties together these sensors and actuators such that autonomous or semi-autonomous drive capabilities are enabled.
When a road vehicle runs in autonomous mode, which means the driver is not required to perform maneuvers, the road vehicle usually is dependent on multiple data sources as inputs to perform the autonomous driving. An autonomous road vehicle uses information about the surrounding environment to drive safely. For instance, a detailed description of the road network inside of which it is operating is used by the autonomous road vehicle to cautiously navigate and plan future trajectories. It should also detect and classify surrounding objects, and estimate their physical properties such as positions, velocities and accelerations. To perform such tasks, autonomous road vehicles are usually provided high density map information and information from multiple sensors measuring both the internal state of the ego vehicle as well as the surrounding environment.
Compared to safety systems available for non-autonomous road vehicles on the market today, an autonomous self-driving road vehicle should be much more reliable, and have a near zero tolerance for serious errors. To accomplish this level of accuracy and reliability, a high degree of sensor redundancy is necessary. This is commonly accomplished through fusing data from multiple sources to provide environmental perception and localization functions where the different functions and algorithms that use sensor data to estimate the information used for enabling reliable autonomous travel are collectively referred to as a fusion system.
Although such fusion systems are known to be used for enabling autonomous travel of road vehicles there is still room for improving the performance of such fusion systems.